The daily Listener Newsletter IOHA Bangalore 2016 Field Notes Spotlight Wednesday, 29 June 2016 1 Panel Discussion / Mesa redonda: “Shifting Perspectives: Oral History and the Memory of Disaster” / “Cambiando Perspectivas: La Historia Oral y la Memoria de los Desastres” Speakers / Ponentes: Mary Marshall Clark (USA), Rama Lakshmi (India), Xun Zhou (China) and Mark Cave (USA) Chair: Don Ritchie (USA) The Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984 is considered one of the worst industrial disasters in the world. Poisonous gas that accidentally leaked from a Union Carbide factory took the lives of an estimated 10,000 people in the surrounding region. When Rama Lakshmi learned that the activists and survivors from Bhopal, India had collected some objects of memory from the survivors’ families, she curated a small exhibition. Through conversations with stakeholders, Rama also learned that they opposed the government’s memorial project. The survivors felt that the government had no moral right to build a memorial. With that came the idea of a survivors’ museum of their own. Funded by the Remember Bhopal Trust, this unique museum relies on oral history. The museum houses twenty objects, which are the only remnants of the victims, and has interactive visual and audiological simulations of the night of the tragedy. It has received an incredible response so far and stands as a powerful reminder to the world that says “No more Bhopal”. Q: What were the challenges of your projects and how did you negotiate them? For my oral history project in Bhopal, there were two big challenges. It was quite a task to get museum-quality recordings, with no distracting sounds or needless echoes. Getting people to speak in a manner which could later be edited, and used, as separate stand-alone audio grabs for the museum, was another challenge. Q: Were there any memorable experiences that you had while conducting interviews that stand out in your memory? My most memorable experience was recording the protest songs that survivors have sung in the movement over three decades. The protest songs have been treated as the literary memory of the movement in the museum. Visit rememberbhopal.net for more details. @IOHA #heardatIOHA With Rama Lakshmi Rama Lakshmi is a journalist and an oral historian who set up the “Remember Bhopal Museum” which sheds light on the struggle for the rights of the survivors from the Bhopal Gas tragedy. In IOHA 2016, Rama is one of the speakers in the second public panel titled: “Shifting perspectives: Oral history and the memory of disaster.” ¡Escuchen queridos lectores! The third edition of The Daily Listener puts the ‘spotlight’ on voices from the margins, especially in the wake of violence and disaster. After the whirlwind of the master classes, public panels and parallel sessions that is the IOHA Conference 2016, this issue asks: how do we navigate the politics of voice? Do marginalised voices really have a ‘voice’? The newsletter provides a platform today for our esteemed contributors to deliberate on these very questions. Urvashi Butalia addresses the tricky terrain of revealing and concealing ‘truth’ in her research narratives of marginalized women. Rama Lakshmi engages us with her thought processes on the creation and upkeep of the ‘Remember Bhopal Museum’ while Miroslav Vanek offers insights into his continued engagement(s) with oral history. We also feature the Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) and their impressive collection. As the IOHA 2016 Conference hits fever pitch, the editorial team hopes to offer more insights, through our contributors’ work, into the idea(s) of voice, politics and the opportunities that oral history provides. Day 3 Citizens Archive of Pakistan The Citizen’s Archive of Pakistan (CAP) is a non-profit organization based out of Karachi and Lahore, established with an aim to preserve the nation’s heritage and culture. Since 2007, the CAP has been working to raise awareness about Pakistan’s history through the voices of its people. The CAP’s flagship project, the Oral History Project (OHP), celebrates ordinary people’s experiences in the decades following Pakistan’s independence. The project, which has collected over 1,800 oral histories, lends voice to those neglected people on the margins of society, whose voices have been hidden from history. The OHP has collaborated with various groups in Pakistan, particularly through ‘sub-projects’ which focus on the histories of minority communities and others, such as the Lollywood film industry. Many of the CAP’s events and exhibitions, such as the Shanaakht (‘Identity’) Festival, draw directly from the OHP oral histories and related materials – newspaper clippings, official correspondence, refugee cards, photographs, passports and the like – all of which the archive seeks to preserve. To date, the project has digitized more than 87,000 photographs from both private and public collections. In future, CAP aims to archive the voices of the partition generation and document a version of that history that cannot be distorted. They plan to establish a Living History Museum of Pakistan that will allow visitors of all ages to experience the history of their nation. The museum will house interactive multimedia exhibits drawn from the material of the rich archives they possess, inviting visitors to touch, feel, think, and play whilst they learn. For more information, visit the CAP website at www.citizensarchive.org.